Club cultures

Raves, clubs and an underground exclusive world of hidden youth movements are among the scenes to which we are transported while reading Club Cultures.

The well known sociologist Sarah Thornton writes this piece of work using a personal style which combines the analysis of specific youth cultures, born in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, with an extensive theoretical background supported by rich ethnographic research. The result is an interesting piece of work which provides a different and very innovative approach to the study of specific sub-cultural groupings.

Thornton makes clear her concern with “the attitudes and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social lives revolve around clubs and raves”. She divides her work into four chapters and each one contains different debates about music, media, consumption and the analysis of subcultures.

Hebdige and Young influences

In the first part of the book, Thornton provides a brief explanation of the theoretical framework and puts forward some key arguments; the objective of her work; and an analysis related to previous studies of subcultures, music and taste. In addition, she critically examines the work on youth cultures done by Dick Hebdige (1979) and Jock Young (1971) and provides a historical overview of youth cultures which formed part of the cultural transitions seen between the 1960s and the 1980s.

The powerful role of the media is clearly dealt with in Thornton’s analysis. She defines subcultures as taste cultures which are labelled by the media as such. To survive as subcultures, these grouping need to be defined by the media as a differentiated grouping which is opposed to the mainstream. Thus, in Thornton’s study, subcultural is a synonym for those practices which clubbers and ravers call underground (Thornton, 1995:8).

Identifiers

Common tastes are one of the main shared elements identifying members of club cultures. The role of the media, the cultural logics of these common characteristics and their socio-economic roots are the main elements of analysis in Thornton’s work.

Thornton draws on the theoretical framework of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; his analysis of distinction and taste; and his definitions of capital. Bourdieu reinvented the concept of capital, dividing it into diverse forms different from the economic capital studied by Marx. Symbolic, cultural and social capital are some of the main forms. However, some other forms of capital have been analysed by different authors.

Thornton makes a major contribution using Bourdieu´s framework, combining Bourdieu´s approach with the analysis of subcultures. As a result, Thornton coins the term subcultural capital, plugging one of the major gaps in the analysis of subcultural groupings. Subcultural capital is a term used to identify the distinction from popular culture and “confers status on his owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder” (11).

Hierarchies in youth cultures

The author examines the hierarchies within popular youth cultures and defines them according to settled systems of distinction which obey the subcultural capital model.

In her second chapter, Thornton explains the importance of the distinction between the “authentic and the inauthentic” in relation to live music, records, and ravers and clubbers. She talks about the authentication of a mass medium, concluding that recorded music has been one of the major factors in relation to the spaces in which club cultures have emerged. Records, according to Thornton, “have become the musical axis around which club and rave crowds gather scenes revolve” (86).

In the third chapter of her book, Thornton presents us with an enjoyable piece of writing about ethnographic research in different clubs in London. Her main objective was to explore some club cultures’ discourses concerning the mainstream and mass culture.


Her conclusions

Her main conclusions are based on the analysis of some dichotomies between the mainstream and alternatives: a) dominant culture and bourgeois ideology against subculture and deviant guard; b) mass culture and commercial ideology against subculture and deviant guard; c) mass culture and commercial ideology against student culture and educated vanguard.

Thornton assumes that “one needs to draw a more complicated picture which takes account of both subjective and objective social structures as well as the implications of cultural plurality” (97) For this reason, for Thornton it is essential to go further and try to analyse and understand social reality as a mix of elements that interact together to shape a complex social structure. In this social structure, contemporary subcultures offer alternatives to the mainstream, but also help to maintain certain socio-economic contradictions.

The fourth and last chapter of this book is devoted to explaining the media development of subcultures. Thornton analyses how media forms an integral part of youth cultures. Using a very wide range of examples, Thornton sets up her approach to the analysis of the differing role of media in the creation of contemporary subcultures. “The idea that authentic culture is somehow outside media and commerce is a resilient one” (p. 116), she argues.

Mass media, micro-media and niche media are just different levels on which subcultures are reproduced. With this argument, she very clearly challenges the position of the Birmingham school and especially, Hebdige’s analysis of subcultures. Thornton presents a strong argument in order to demonstrate how subcultures are not at all disconnected from media, marketing and commercialization, from the very origins of the creation of contemporary subcultural groupings. “Subcultures that never go beyond their initial base market are ultimately considered failures” (128). Fashion, taste and consumption are related to the creation and development of youth cultures and the media has a key role.

Club Cultures is a great piece of work which is very valuable for sociology, cultural and media studies. Thornton presents a new approach to the analysis of youth cultures and explores novel questions regarding the roles of the subcultures of the 1980s and 90s. In addition, her work is very innovative considering the overall lack of analyses of clubbers as a sub-cultural and unique phenomenon.

Thornton challenges the Birmingham school, offering a new and interesting approach supported by a large number of interviews, ethnographic studies and provides a readable and theoretically well structured piece of work. Her theoretical framework, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is very significant for the field of sub-cultural studies and she approaches it well, combining different methods of analysis and intriguing case studies.


Club Cultures: Music Media and Style
by Sarah Thornton
Review by Lorena Nessi

Sarah Thornton (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Sucbcultural Capital Cambridge: Polity Press.